Marjorie Kelly
Marjorie Kelly's current work is focused on the great transformation toward sustainability and equity that is beginning in our time, and on the role that transformed, redesigned corporations can play in creating a globally beneficial economy. As capitalism is at the epicenter of the multiple crises facing us today — from resource exhaustion and global warming to the mortgage meltdown and spreading economic malaise — a transformation of capitalism will likewise lie at the center of our efforts to build a sustainable, equitable new world order.
Kelly has followed the progress of corporate social responsibility as a business journalist since 1987. She was the co-founder and publisher of Business Ethics magazine for 20 years. In recent years she has joined the Tellus Institute in Boston, which is a think tank with decades of consulting experience in energy and global resource use, which has repositioned itself with a new aim of helping society navigate a Great Transition toward ways of producing, consuming, and living that balance the rights of people today with those of future generations and the wider community of life. At Tellus, Kelly co-founded Corporation 20/20, a project to create the vision and chart the course for the future corporation.
She is working on a new book with the working title, For-Benefit Enterprise and the Dawn of a Globally Beneficial Economy, about the emergence of a new species of organizational design in the growing number of enterprises that are neither non-profit nor for-profit but a hybrid of the two. Her first book was The Divine Right of Capital, published by Berrett-Koehler in 2001, which offered an analysis of the core problem with the current design of corporations. Library Journal named it one of the best business books of the year. The book was translated into three languages, and is used in numerous college classrooms and citizen group discussions.
Kelly's writings have appeared in publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Utne Reader, Chief Executive, Tikkun, E Magazine, YES! Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Strategic Corporate Initiative sponsored by Corporate Ethics International, and the Advisory Board for Citizens for Corporate Redesign in Minnesota, as well as serving on advisory boards for the International Institute for Corporate Governance and Accountability at George Washington University Law School, the Capital Ownership Group, and the Citizen Works Corporate Reform Commission.
Kelly attended Earlham College and the University of Missouri, receiving a bachelor's in English, cum laude, and a master's in journalism. For a decade she has been a student of Zen Buddhism, studying with Steve Hagen of Dharma Field in Minneapolis, author of Buddhism Plain and Simple. She has been inducted into the portrait gallery of Americans Who Tell the Truth.
Lecture Topics: Transitioning to For-Benefit Business.
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